Hackaday Prize Entry: A DIY Smartphone

It may not change the world, but [Tyler]’s DIY smartphone is a great example of what you can do with off-the-shelf parts. He built a complete, working cell phone using a Raspberry Pi, a few parts from Adafruit, and a 3D printed enclosure.

For the OS, [Tyler] isn’t running Android; that’s only for the Raspi 2, and the Raspberry Pi 2 Model A isn’t out yet. Instead, [Tyler] wrote his own not-OS in Python. It can send and receive SMS messages, make calls, take pictures, connect to WiFi networks, and do just about everything else a Nokia from 2003 can do.

[Tyler] put together a video going over all of the features of his Tyfone. You can check that out below.

12 thoughts on “Hackaday Prize Entry: A DIY Smartphone”

Huh, neat! Obvious next step is putting that all on the same PCB. It would be very, very cool to get a phone on the market that could be easily hardware-modified. I did some work on an old iPhone 4s, just small things like antenna modification/better lights.

I’d never do a open source phone.. You get a market share and your probability of lawsuits do to bugs and vulnerabilities affecting clients data go up a lot and owners of networks and their political connections are pretty much your boss whether you like it or not..

But I’m sure the reason Apple, Google, and Microsoft have buffer overflows and encryption problems is because they don’t have amateur circuit builders writing millions of lines of code for them..